Things I remember. A curtsey. Learning how to read with The Big Red Book, Mrs. Semel, my kindergarten teacher. I never stopped. My copy of Jane Eyre — clothbound, etchings, a picture of Jane, curled up on a window seat in a library, reading, part of a box set with Wuthering Heights. It was green. I think it’s the book that made me a reader. Or it might have been Half Magic. Or The Hobbit. A Little Princess. The Secret Garden. Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Nancy Drew. Harriet the Spy. The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Freaky Friday. Billy Hall, the boy with straw-colored hair that I loved in fourth and fifth grade, the scarecrow to my Dorothy, before I moved from Convent Station, New Jersey to Atlanta, Georgia. Bonita Covington, a girl who beat me up in the third grade when I wouldn’t trade my tiny, perfect monkey sticker. She took my stocking cap off in the playground and ground it into the slush. I had to shake her hand in the principal’s office and felt, for the first time, the smack of injustice. Mrs. Thran, my first southern teacher, fifth grade, how she smelled and how she forced me to say yes, ma’am. The smell in the boxwood hedges where I’d crouch, aged four or so, hiding, the dappled light and the other children’s cries, mint, I think, with honeysuckle. Daisy chains and buttercups. Hold one up, under your chin and if you see yellow, you’re sweet. My mother. My father. My sisters.Women friends threaded through. Watching an uncle wash a cousin’s mouth out with soap, the bubbles. The boy who traced the social dances of bees in the dirt at my feet, midnight, the Old Well, his Cheshire cat smile and smooth skin. Virginia Woolf, Dostoyevsky, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell. The steps of Wilson library, his hand on my neck, the Carolina quad shimmering, the oaks, the blue, if this were Cro-Magnon times, I’d eat you up, he said. A hotel in Hartford, a yellow car, an air-conditioner that fell out of the window, so much laughing, the bed a boat on an endless sea. Rowing. Marriage. The dunes of Kitty Hawk and Ocracoke Island. Betrayal. Rupture. New York City. Pastries, so many pastries, tea girl at the St. Regis, tempering chocolate in the tiny apartment on 73rd, pouring it into French molds, inviting a man in to tea, Bengal Tiger, riding the bus to Grand Central, packed like sardines, a Chinese feast in Queens with Mr. Kwok, Mr. Chung, Damian, the Columbian, the day the World Trade Center was bombed, the house at the top of the hill in Croton-on-the-Hudson, the deer-bitten flowers, picking the ice out of the lock on my car, the thin pool frozen in the bathtub, seventeen snow storms that winter, another marriage. Istanbul and the Pera Palace, the black rock beaches of Chios, a trimester alone, mold growing in shoes, baking, always baking, lying in the restaurant closet on the floor, pregnancy exhaust, a brown and black-checked dress, the fourth floor walk-up, trays of cookies for the rich cooling on spiral steps. Waiting. A last trip to the beach, a red and black hat, the freezing wind of Coney Island. The days overdue, the shrinking water, then the flood of relief, the doctor cried it’s a girl! and Sophie was born. March 8, 1995. All the days after.
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Beautiful writing, Elizabeth.
Wow. And so much much more. Happy Birthday to Sophie and you. May the days ahead be kind and full of love, and when they are not, may you find comfort in the familiar.